Friday, June 13, 2014

Window on Eurasia: Russian National Security Undermined by Alienation between Russians and Ukrainians Living in Russia, Leader Says

Paul
Goble

Staunton, June 13 – Russia has a
sufficiently strong army to “put any country in its place,” Bogdan Bezpalko,
the head of the Federation of National Cultural Autonomies of Ukrainians of
Russia, says, but “domestic contradictions” between Russians and other groups,
including ethnic Ukrainians, “represent a danger.”

In a commentary posted online
yesterday, Bezpalko says that “absolutely all republics which were part of the
USSR and are now independent states have adopted an ethno-national course of
development” and “are building ethno-centric states,” something that has
negative consequences for Russians and Ukrainians there (nazaccent.ru/column/42/).

Because of its 1992 federal treaty,
he continues, the Russian Federation has largely been able to “avoid
large-scale inter-ethnic conflicts,” but this has come at a high price, one
involving “a definite disbalance within the country” between ethnic republics
and the predominantly Russian oblasts and krays.

This lack of balance is creating
conditions involving national languages and national histories which could lead
to conflicts 20 to 30 years from now, the Russian Ukrainian leader says.

As far as Ukraine is concerned,
Bezpalko says, the conflict that is going on is “not between ethnoses and not
between Ukrainians and Russians. This
war is a purely ideological one,” he continues, between those “who have been educated
in one set of values, according to one set of textbooks and in one culture” and
those who were raised on others.

As far as ethnic Ukrainians living inside the Russian Federation are
concerned, he argues, there are “symptoms” of this that give rise to “concern” even
among those who haven’t been formally educated according to an alternative set
of textbooks.“To a definite degree,
they do not see themselves as part of Russia.”

Instead,
“they conceive a city, settlement or family as their small motherland, and they
view their big motherland as a republic but not the Russian Federation.They do not feel themselves at home in
Russia.”

That
is worrisome, Bezpalko says, given that ethnic Ukrainians form significant
portions of the population in many parts of the country, and he suggests that
it reflects the failure of the Russian authorities to address the issues
involving the integration of ethnic Ukrainians into Russian life until
recently.

Indeed,
the Russian Ukrainian leader says, Moscow’s nationality policy “for a long time
did not devote attention to certain ideological moments which from time to time
came to us from Ukraine.” Ukrainian nationalist groups like UNA-UNSO were “not
recognized as extremist,” and that mean they could “peacefully conduct
propaganda here.

“To a
certain degree,” he says, they were “successful” because “a number of Russian
citizens who identified as Ukrainians accepted this ideology.”Some of them moved to Ukraine, and “it is
complicated to say how many people remain in [Russia’s] regions while being in
fact anti-Russian.”But this “requires
careful monitoring and study.”

Bezpalko
says that in his view, “our basic task” is to promote among ethnic Ukrainians
in the Russian Federation a sense of membership in “an all-Russian civic nation.”
If that doesn’t happen, there will always be “external forces” which will use
internal divisions to weaken the country.